The DAA — Design District of Art and Architecture — is one of Saint Petersburg's most significant creative venues: a large-scale building housing furniture and design stores, art galleries, architecture studios, and exhibition pavilions, with each floor dedicated to a different artistic discipline.

The commission was simple in its problem statement: a 7,000 square meter interior courtyard, visible from virtually every unit in the building, had no identity and no activity. The directors wanted it transformed.

Our immediate reading of the space was that filling it was not the answer. The courtyard was large enough that any programmatic intervention — terraces, markets, retail, vegetation — would either crowd it or fail to fill it convincingly. What the space needed was a center of gravity: a single element that could tone every surrounding space and give the entire courtyard a place to look.

The solution was a red aerial sculpture, suspended from the building structure above the courtyard's geometric center. Its color — red — was chosen for its capacity to be visible from all floors, at all lighting conditions, and in all seasons, including Saint Petersburg's snow-covered winter months. The sculpture's suspended position means it simultaneously occupies the air and frames the ground without obstructing either.

From this central element, the landscape design radiates outward in a system that unifies the four art disciplines housed in the building — architecture, painting, sculpture, and poetry — into a single legible public space. The result demonstrates that the most effective interventions in complex urban environments are often not additive but focal.